


Today is going to be a better one

by Mix Stitch (Synph)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Coda, Episode: s03e14 More Bad Than Good, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Werewolf Biology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 12:43:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2732975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Synph/pseuds/Mix%20Stitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Taking care of those that need it is part of what being part of a pack -- a good pack-- seems to mean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Today is going to be a better one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tristen84](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristen84/gifts).



> A commission for tristen84!
> 
> Set directly after Season 3, Episode 14: More Bad than Good and takes liberties with how werewolf healing works. So for this story, assume that just being a werewolf doesn't mean they heal everything immediately. Depending on their power level and their ability to focus enough to calm down, werewolves might have trouble healing immediately if they aren't alphas.

Scott doesn't  _think_  that werewolves can have heart attacks, but that doesn't mean that he doesn't feel like he's having one when he finally glances at his phone and sees three missed calls and no fewer than ten increasingly frantic texts from Allison about Isaac.

About Isaac being hurt.

Scott's throat tightens with pain as well as with the urge to let loose another sky shaking roar. He feels his nails start to shift, ragged edges turning into jagged points that dig into his palms when he curls his fingers into fists. The scent of blood comes and then, as the wounds seal themselves, starts to dull.

That scream from earlier, that earth-shattering cry of pain that had hit Scott in his  _heart_  and made him almost wreck his bike on the trails --

That had been Isaac.

As a new werewolf and a beta at that, Isaac doesn't heal anywhere near as fast as Scott does. He'll heal faster than a human would, taking hours to heal a wound that might have cost a human their limb, but it's still longer than the time it'd take Scott to heal his own wounds. Scott needs to get to him now, needs to do  _something_  to make up for the fact that his beta called out and  _he didn't come_.

With his heart thudding hard enough to make even  _him_  feel light-headed, Scott shoves his phone in his pocket and walks over to where Stiles is hanging off to the side, keeping an eye on both him and Malia. As happy as he is to have helped his best friend's dad close a case  _and_  get Malia back to her father, he can't stay to bask in whatever glory comes from helping. He has to go to Isaac, to do  _something_.

Stiles looks up from his cellphone when Scott gets close. At first, he looks pleased with himself, the way that he's looked ever since his dad called for backup and someone to check Malia out, but then he frowns, forehead furrowing.

"You okay, man?" Stiles asks, slipping his phone into the back pocket of his jeans.

"I have to leave," Scott says in lieu of an actual answer to Stiles' question.

Still frowning, Stiles straightens up. "What's wrong?"

"Isaac's hurt," Scott bites out. "Allison was trying to reach me but I only just got the texts. I have to go find them." Scott doesn't wait for Stiles' response. He turns, mind fully on the run through the woods that he's going to have to make. "I'll be back."

Stiles grabs Scott before he can take off. "Wait."

"Wait?" Scott says, a growling note underlying his voice. He turns on Stiles, eyes wide. "He's not an alpha, Stiles. He can't heal like I can." He crosses his arms over his chest, feeling his own frown deepen. "I have to go to him. I have to get him out to Deaton's."

Stiles rolls his eyes.

"Okay so how exactly will you do that with your bike?" Stiles asks. "Don't tell me that you're going to make him ride with you despite his injuries…" Despite the sarcasm heavy in his voice, Stiles pauses to yank the keys to his jeep out of his pocket and press them into Scott's palm. "Take the jeep. If you can get close enough to where they are, you and Allison can probably stuff him in the back without hurting him too much."

Scott manages a smile for his best friend. "I'm going to get blood all over your baby," he warns teasingly.

Stiles snorts. "I know," he says drily. "That's why you're paying for me to take her in for a proper cleaning once this is all over. Scarf boy can help if he wants." Stiles sobers. "Go. I'll stay here with Dad."

Scott doesn't need to be told twice.

*

Deaton's Clinic isn't officially closed when they get there (part of what being the only vet in a small town means, Scott figures), but he takes one look at Isaac and rushes forward to flip the sign and lock the door.

"What happened?" Deaton asks, eyes drifting down to the bloody leg of Isaac's jeans and the way that the leg itself is dragging uselessly behind him.

Isaac grunts with pain, eyes rolling in their sockets.

"Animal trap in the woods," Scott bites out, arm flexing as he holds Isaac tight to him when the other werewolves knees threaten to give out. "While we were all looking for the werecoyote -- Malia, I mean -- one of the traps her dad put out snapped shut on his leg." Scott hitches Isaac up a little bit more when Isaac makes one of those almost pitiful noises and threatens to pitch them both forward. "Is there someplace he can lie down?"

"Downstairs," Deaton says, rushing ahead of them. "I already have some towels laid out from when I thought you'd bring Malia directly here." He glances over his shoulder as Scott helps ease Isaac down the stairs, wincing for his friend and his beta the entire way. "But I assume that since you're not dragging an unconscious shifter with you as well, that things went well."

Isaac snorts, the sound seeming rough with pain. "Well enough," he mutters darkly, wincing at the pain in his leg. "At least nobody  _died_."

There's no arguing with that logic, and Scott holds his tongue as he helps Isaac onto one of the low examination tables in the basement examination room. Immediately, Isaac rolls over onto his side, stretching out as best as he can despite the pain in his leg.

"We need to clean the wound," Deaton says, coming back to their side with a pair of scissors. "I know you can't get infections from anything short of wolfsbane on a weapon, but the healing process will speed up if your body isn't trying to do too much at once."

Isaac balks at the sight of the scissors in Deaton's hand. He growls, eyes flashing gold in the overhead light. "No," he barks out, teeth already lengthening with the urge to shift and defend himself.

Scott's grip on Isaac's shoulder tightens, but he doesn't look away from his boss.

"I'll do it," Scott says in as calm a voice as he can with Isaac pushing against his hold. "I'll clean the wound and bandage it. Do you -- do you think you can get him chips or something to eat though?"

Deaton looks at him, dark eyes unreadable for a long moment. He smiles a moment later though and tension that Scott didn't know he was carrying eases out of his shoulders as they slump.

"I'll do you one better," Deaton says, speaking almost cheerfully before he hands over the scissors. "I know I have some bags of beef jerky in my desk. I'll bring them down before I leave. You'll lock up when you’re done?"

Scott nods quickly. "Y-yeah," he says, actually stuttering over his words for a second. "I mean, yeah. I'll lock up and everything before we leave." He lets up on Isaac, letting him go as Deaton heads for the stairs. "Thank you."

Deaton waves the words away before he goes, leaving Scott alone with a werewolf too stressed out to focus on healing.

"So," Scott says, moving down to where the right leg of Isaac's jeans are soaked red and tacky with blood. "I really hope you didn't like these pants as-is." The scissors in his hands are big enough that they might actually be gardening shears and Scott knows just from looking at them, that they'll make short work of snipping right through Isaac's jeans.

Isaac groans with disgust this time, not pain, and slaps one hand over his eyes. "Just get over with it," he snarls.

So Scott does.

*

As far as injuries go, the puncture wounds that go through Isaac's calf are among the worst. Once Scott manages to clean the wounds, he balks at the sight of them. Some part of his mind, probably the part that has no problem with wanting to go deer hunting in the preserve, wants to make Malia's father see what he's done. An even smaller part of Scott's brain, wants him to pay.

Scott shakes his head, frowning. "I think the ankle's broken," he murmurs, reaching out to gently palpitate Isaac's calf. At the way that Isaac's already wide eyes get wider and his head drops back against the mound of towels forming a makeshift pillow, well -- Scott's never been unhappier to have his suspicions confirmed.

"What does that mean?" Isaac asks, his features twisting both with worry and pain.

"It's not that bad," Scott rushes to say. "Broken bones just take a while to heal. We might be here a while." He squints at Isaac's leg, wishing in vain that x-ray vision came standard with the alpha werewolf package. "Stay here. I'll go get a splint for you and some of that beef jerky Deaton left. It'll help you heal faster."

Isaac frowns, muttering "Where exactly would I go with my leg like this?" underneath his breath as Scott heads off in the direction of the supply cabinets.

Scott ignores the huffy comment for the most part, but he smiles when his back is turned. If Isaac can still be snarky with him, he can't be too worse for wear. From the big cabinet, Scott grabs the splint before he turns to the smaller cabinet where Deaton keeps things like tranquilizers and stronger-than-usual pain pills.

"Do you want to take something for the pain?" Scott calls out. "Deaton's got some stuff here that'll work on werewolves --

"Hell no," Isaac replies promptly, without waiting for Scott to finish his sentence. "I don't want anything putting me to sleep. I'll be fine." He tries to stretch out then and Scott can hear the way he winces in pain before he slumps back against the haphazard pile of towels underneath his body.

Scott frowns tightly as he crosses the room. He yanks open the bag of jerky with one hand and then pushes it into Isaac's hand. "Eat this," Scott orders, voice low with command. "And try not to move. I'm going to try and ease the pain."

Isaac stills, fingers clasped tight around the bag of jerky. "Excuse me?"

The way Isaac looks -- like he can't believe that anyone would hurt themselves just to help  _him_  -- erases any lingering doubt from his mind. Scott rolls back the sleeves of his Henley and then reaches out to touch Isaac's leg with his right hand. At first, his grip is light, tentative. He doesn't fully understand the process of transference, only that he can't actually  _heal_  anyone, but when he's like this, focusing on someone's pain and scenting out the almost jagged scent of their pain, he always wishes that he could.

"I'm not going to break," Isaac mutters with as dirty a look as he can muster with a mouth full of beef jerky. "You  _can_  press harder." A second later when Scott does, his eyes narrow. "Not  _that_  much harder!"

Scott apologizes on instinct, more focused on drawing Isaac's pain into himself than on the affronted look on the other werewolf's face. Pulling Isaac's pain into his body burns. The veins in his right hand and arm darken until they're black against the deep tan of his skin and Scott feels like he's pulling acid into his veins. But then, as much as it hurts him now, the actual pain that Isaac felt before had to have been worse.

Isaac slumps against the table, chest heaving.

"You -- you okay, man?" Scott manages to ask as he tries to catch his own breath. He leans heavily on the end of the examination table, putting his weight on the table as he tries to keep from tipping over. "I can do it again when the pain comes back, okay? Just let me know."

Isaac nods. "Yeah, okay."

Scott forces himself to stand up. He leaves Isaac stuffing his face with beef jerky and then heads in search of a chair before making a last-minute detour back upstairs so that he can grab a couple of sodas from the vending machine that he and Stiles' had hacked within his first week working with Deaton.

When Scott comes back with a folding chair hooked in the bend of his elbow, Isaac is sitting up.

"Whoa, are you okay?"

Isaac nods once. "Just got tired of staring at the ceiling," he says. He zeroes in on the cans of soda cradled in Scott's shirt, his eyes light up. "Tell me you have Mountain Dew."  He catches the can that Scott tosses at him and then grins, the first real smile Scott's seen from him in hours. "Thanks for all of this, man."

"It's nothing," Scott says. He pulls open the folding chair and sinks into it hard enough that the metal creaks loudly enough for their senses to pick up on it. "I just wanted to make sure that you were okay. You'd do it for me if you had to."

Isaac falls silent for a long moment, eyes focused on the front of his can.

"I'll deny this if you bring it up again," Isaac says apropos of nothing, "But it's nice having someone patch me up for once." He scowls quickly when he sees the edges of Scott's smile. "I'm not kidding about that first bit, Scott. If Stilinski starts laughing at me because you've told him about this, I'm going to lie and then I'm probably going to hurt him."

Scott pushes own his smile and the urge to laugh in response. "I know, man," he says. "It's cool. Besides, you're pack. Patching each other up is part of the job."


End file.
